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> The OpenAI chief told White House officials that A.I. data centers would be a catalyst for the re-industrialization of America, creating as many as half a mil

by a13n 2y ago

> The OpenAI chief told White House officials that A.I. data centers would be a catalyst for the re-industrialization of America, creating as many as half a million jobs Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking.

tarikozket 2y ago
someone gotta plug the GPUs in and run the cables, right?
- Terr_ 2y ago
  But after they plug in the GPUs and run the cables, Large Language Models will give everyone personal robot servants and jetpacks while allowing {your generous investment nation here} to conquer all the economies. /s
- mirekrusin 2y ago
  there should be robot for that
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    There should be and could be a robot for everything. The scale and variability of the tasks just don't make them viable. I should have a machine that peels my potatoes. I should have a machine that cooks me my favorite meal at the push of a button. I should have a machine that I can feed fabric into and it will sew me a shirt. All of these things are doable, but they don't make economic sense or they need to handle too many unforeseen cases. A machine that sews shirts doesn't make sense to have at home, but if you're selling millions of shirts then it does. Same for all the rest. A machine that runs all the cables etc needs to be too complicated to handle all the eventualities that there isn't enough scale (yet) to justify its existence. Basically, we don't build enough data centers.
    - mirekrusin 2y ago
      When it comes to arms people don't seem to have problems with so many zeroes in cost and scale in general. Make fabs, not war.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking Would have to be energy. Data centres have light human footprints. And Altman wants to fabricate the chips in the Middle East, not America [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/openai-s-altman-pitches-global-ai-coalition-on-trip-to-middle-east https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/openai-s-...
- segasaturn 2y ago
  Yes, according to Vox Microsoft is leasing all the energy from the Three Mile nuclear power plant and planning to construct more to power their AI training. People pointed out how much energy Bitcoin was (and still is) wasting, AI looks like it's going to dwarf that amount of energy use for an equally questionable product. e: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249770/microsoft-three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-deal-ai-data-centers https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249770/microsoft-three-...
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    "Equally questionable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There are literally massive, paradigm-changing projects in both spaces right now, with real users and communities. If you haven't gotten anything out of these technologies, that's on you and not them. There's all manner of insane, ambitious things being worked on in the open right now, if you are able to muster the discernment necessary to ignore the natural, unavoidable pile of grift that follows any new technology or hype cycle.
    - jjulius 2y ago
      >There are literally massive, paradigm-changing projects in both spaces right now, with real users and communities. And in your opinion, these are...?
      - soulofmischief 2y ago
        Regarding crypto, IC[0] for example is an incredible experiment to make decentralized cloud compute viable, using WASM runtimes. Lots of neat crypto projects like this. People forget the whole point was decentralization and trustless systems. While the grifters settled on centralized systems and gaslighting users, real crypto projects continue to explore the possibilities of decentralization. With AI, I don't even know where to start. Have you used the internet recently? We have multimodal transformer models which can input and output images, video and text. We can create music and images using diffusion techniques. We have world-class text generation systems, which of course still need a lot of infrastructural support, but the viability is already being proven. We have cutting-edge translation tools which blow anything previous out the water. We have code generation and introspection tools, which work well enough to majorly augment my engineering workflow. We are developing ways to "speak" with your data, turning natural language into advance query, analysis and synthesis tasks. We have neural radiance fields. Lip syncing and voice translation tech to automate localization in powerful new ways. And we have open models! Anyone can dive in, fine-tune a model and get viable results today. We can already start creating new pipelines today, so that we aren't wasting our time doing that once models get better at not hallucinating. The individuals and organizations who wait for this new technology to be perfectly reliable will get left in the dust by those who took the chance and did the pioneering work. This is still barely scratching the surface. It seems like there's at least one ground-breaking paper a month, often more than that. It's certainly easier to bash these technologies and communities from afar, but that attitude will only hinder you in the future once the tech has caught up. What we have already created through experimentation just since 2015 is stuff that I grew up reading about in science fiction. Could we hit an AI winter instead? Will decentralization ultimately be a dead end? Maybe. But it would be considerate to not bash those who are spending time and money to find out, and to not let grifters whom they cannot control co-opt the space and the narrative around it. [0] https://internetcomputer.org/ https://internetcomputer.org/
weego 2y ago
They want huge tax credits for data centers that then won't employ many people or will employ visa'd migrants, but that can of worms can be kicked down the road to another administration.
moogly 2y ago
All the people within creative arts will have to start working in the lithium mines. So that's accurate.
throwaway4233 2y ago
> Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking. My assumption is that the data centers would mostly be staffed by those who will have to manually audit data going in and out of the LLMs on a daily basis. There would also be a need to generate/curate the test data that the LLMs will have train on. There is potential for half a million jobs, but is that what you would want to have human effort invested in, is the real question.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  Such a job would not be at the data center. And existing data cleanup jobs are off-shored to cheaper labor, there's no indication that would change.
ben_w 2y ago
"The factory of the future is a man and a dog. The man's job is to feed the dog. The dog's job is to bite the man if he touches anything." There will therefore be a sudden supply of half a million such factories.
- beeflet 2y ago
  I like how this quote combines the bleak reality of automation with the imagery of a far side comic
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    Plot twist: it’s the Black Mirror take on Autofac
selimthegrim 2y ago
You better tell Memphis that.
xbar 2y ago
Altman is not a good economist.
BeefWellington 2y ago
> Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking. Think the Matrix, only the futuristic artificial intelligence isn't harvesting human brainpower/heat -- instead most people work at power plants.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  In the poorly-thought-out script of The Matrix, the people work as power plants.
namaria 2y ago
It's snakeoil. It cures all, it solves every problem. Pay the man now and he'll show it later.
- this_steve_j 2y ago
  Patent medicine is how I like to think about it. Strong placebo effect, occasionally some health benefits, mostly nominal. Strong economic incentives and some harmful effects. Traveling salesmen who claim wonders, then leave town before the miracle is delivered. Not working for you? Be the first to try the new elixir.
_heimdall 2y ago
Energy, infrastructure, and the potential for new executive branches dedicated only to enforcing AI regulation would go pretty far. The government is pretty damn good at spending too much money and creating jobs, they often don't need much of a reason as long as it justifies spending more money and centralizing more power.

by a13n 2y ago

tarikozket 2y ago

someone gotta plug the GPUs in and run the cables, right?

Terr_ 2y ago
But after they plug in the GPUs and run the cables, Large Language Models will give everyone personal robot servants and jetpacks while allowing {your generous investment nation here} to conquer all the economies. /s
mirekrusin 2y ago
there should be robot for that
- Aerroon 2y ago
  There should be and could be a robot for everything. The scale and variability of the tasks just don't make them viable. I should have a machine that peels my potatoes. I should have a machine that cooks me my favorite meal at the push of a button. I should have a machine that I can feed fabric into and it will sew me a shirt. All of these things are doable, but they don't make economic sense or they need to handle too many unforeseen cases. A machine that sews shirts doesn't make sense to have at home, but if you're selling millions of shirts then it does. Same for all the rest. A machine that runs all the cables etc needs to be too complicated to handle all the eventualities that there isn't enough scale (yet) to justify its existence. Basically, we don't build enough data centers.
  - mirekrusin 2y ago
    When it comes to arms people don't seem to have problems with so many zeroes in cost and scale in general. Make fabs, not war.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking Would have to be energy. Data centres have light human footprints. And Altman wants to fabricate the chips in the Middle East, not America [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/openai-s-altman-pitches-global-ai-coalition-on-trip-to-middle-east https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/openai-s-...

segasaturn 2y ago
Yes, according to Vox Microsoft is leasing all the energy from the Three Mile nuclear power plant and planning to construct more to power their AI training. People pointed out how much energy Bitcoin was (and still is) wasting, AI looks like it's going to dwarf that amount of energy use for an equally questionable product. e: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249770/microsoft-three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-deal-ai-data-centers https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249770/microsoft-three-...
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  "Equally questionable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There are literally massive, paradigm-changing projects in both spaces right now, with real users and communities. If you haven't gotten anything out of these technologies, that's on you and not them. There's all manner of insane, ambitious things being worked on in the open right now, if you are able to muster the discernment necessary to ignore the natural, unavoidable pile of grift that follows any new technology or hype cycle.
  - jjulius 2y ago
    >There are literally massive, paradigm-changing projects in both spaces right now, with real users and communities. And in your opinion, these are...?
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      Regarding crypto, IC[0] for example is an incredible experiment to make decentralized cloud compute viable, using WASM runtimes. Lots of neat crypto projects like this. People forget the whole point was decentralization and trustless systems. While the grifters settled on centralized systems and gaslighting users, real crypto projects continue to explore the possibilities of decentralization. With AI, I don't even know where to start. Have you used the internet recently? We have multimodal transformer models which can input and output images, video and text. We can create music and images using diffusion techniques. We have world-class text generation systems, which of course still need a lot of infrastructural support, but the viability is already being proven. We have cutting-edge translation tools which blow anything previous out the water. We have code generation and introspection tools, which work well enough to majorly augment my engineering workflow. We are developing ways to "speak" with your data, turning natural language into advance query, analysis and synthesis tasks. We have neural radiance fields. Lip syncing and voice translation tech to automate localization in powerful new ways. And we have open models! Anyone can dive in, fine-tune a model and get viable results today. We can already start creating new pipelines today, so that we aren't wasting our time doing that once models get better at not hallucinating. The individuals and organizations who wait for this new technology to be perfectly reliable will get left in the dust by those who took the chance and did the pioneering work. This is still barely scratching the surface. It seems like there's at least one ground-breaking paper a month, often more than that. It's certainly easier to bash these technologies and communities from afar, but that attitude will only hinder you in the future once the tech has caught up. What we have already created through experimentation just since 2015 is stuff that I grew up reading about in science fiction. Could we hit an AI winter instead? Will decentralization ultimately be a dead end? Maybe. But it would be considerate to not bash those who are spending time and money to find out, and to not let grifters whom they cannot control co-opt the space and the narrative around it. [0] https://internetcomputer.org/ https://internetcomputer.org/

weego 2y ago

They want huge tax credits for data centers that then won't employ many people or will employ visa'd migrants, but that can of worms can be kicked down the road to another administration.

moogly 2y ago

All the people within creative arts will have to start working in the lithium mines. So that's accurate.

throwaway4233 2y ago

> Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking. My assumption is that the data centers would mostly be staffed by those who will have to manually audit data going in and out of the LLMs on a daily basis. There would also be a need to generate/curate the test data that the LLMs will have train on. There is potential for half a million jobs, but is that what you would want to have human effort invested in, is the real question.

yencabulator 2y ago
Such a job would not be at the data center. And existing data cleanup jobs are off-shored to cheaper labor, there's no indication that would change.

ben_w 2y ago

"The factory of the future is a man and a dog. The man's job is to feed the dog. The dog's job is to bite the man if he touches anything." There will therefore be a sudden supply of half a million such factories.

beeflet 2y ago
I like how this quote combines the bleak reality of automation with the imagery of a far side comic
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Plot twist: it’s the Black Mirror take on Autofac

selimthegrim 2y ago

You better tell Memphis that.

xbar 2y ago

Altman is not a good economist.

BeefWellington 2y ago

> Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking. Think the Matrix, only the futuristic artificial intelligence isn't harvesting human brainpower/heat -- instead most people work at power plants.

yencabulator 2y ago
In the poorly-thought-out script of The Matrix, the people work as power plants.

namaria 2y ago

It's snakeoil. It cures all, it solves every problem. Pay the man now and he'll show it later.

this_steve_j 2y ago
Patent medicine is how I like to think about it. Strong placebo effect, occasionally some health benefits, mostly nominal. Strong economic incentives and some harmful effects. Traveling salesmen who claim wonders, then leave town before the miracle is delivered. Not working for you? Be the first to try the new elixir.

_heimdall 2y ago

Energy, infrastructure, and the potential for new executive branches dedicated only to enforcing AI regulation would go pretty far. The government is pretty damn good at spending too much money and creating jobs, they often don't need much of a reason as long as it justifies spending more money and centralizing more power.